


One Thread

by RurouniHime



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Stiles, Emissary Stiles Stilinski, Established Relationship, Future Fic, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt Derek, M/M, Magic, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Mating Bond, McCall Pack, Original Character Death(s), Pack Family, Protective Pack, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, Sex, Soul Bond, Temporary Character Death, True Alpha Scott McCall, Wolfsbane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 12:04:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15840939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: In the middle of the night, his dad comes into the room and crawls onto the bed behind him, easing Stiles into the vee of his legs. He settles back against the headboard with a groan and doesn’t say anything for a long time. Stiles wraps his arms around one of his dad’s legs, presses his cheek to warm flannel, and tries to be still.“Oh, kid,” his dad exhales. His hand comes down on the side of Stiles’ neck and his fingers press gently. “Ineverwanted you to know this pain.”(Or, Derek dies. Stiles reacts Badly.)





	One Thread

**Author's Note:**

> Almost as soon as the (fantastic!) TW magic theory made an appearance in Season 2, I started wondering about this scenario. This is an alternate universe that diverges after S2, but also takes into account several later canon events. 
> 
> Without spoilers: Certain people are still alive. Certain people are back from where they went. The events of the Alpha Pack and the Nogitsune are referenced but didn't play out exactly as they did in canon. Also, I'm still watching the show and I haven't met Kira yet, so she's not here. Sorry.
> 
> Some triggery stuff (possibly?). See end notes for details.

_It can be pretty extraordinary, what the force of your own will can accomplish. ~Alan Deaton_

 

**

Stiles remembers skidding to a stop on dry leaves between the massive oak and ash, his back to the hawthorn, and Erica wheeling around on their wall of pursuers with a snarl, drawing them right up the center. Right where he wanted them. He caught the gleam of her claws as he dropped to one knee and slammed the vial onto its side in the dirt. He remembers the magic fizzing down both arms, out through his fingertips into the earth, booming through the roots below. Every one of his tattoos was a knot of fierce emerald light. He remembers it ripping dead pine needles and detritus up from the ground as it blasted outward, Erica’s bright hair snapping forward as the magic parted around her. As it took the hunters up into the air and back down again in a spine-cracking thunderclap.

He remembers the snap in his belly—fizz-pop, a preternatural life snuffing out—when elsewhere in the forest, the hunters’ witch finally, finally died. Tied herself too tightly to her own enhancement spell when Stiles tore it free of her companions.

He remembers: they were winning.

And he remembers Scott’s howl.

The forest shook with it, subwoofers grinding through Stiles’ innards. He remembers, in vivid Technicolor, the way Erica froze. The look in her _eyes._ The way she ran then, and the way he tore after her through the woods.

**

The clearing closest to the pack house is a bloodbath. The scent of iron is everywhere, with the sour smear of gunpowder laid over it. Bodies litter the ground. Stiles pitches forward, dizzy from the speed of the chase—he’s still human, whatever his life; he’s not made for the things his body can now do. The words of the recognition spell drop off his tongue in a rush. He braces on his knees as he heaves for air, and slowly, subtly, the glimmering spell settles around him. 

No bodies glowing blue. Thank fuck, none of them... Not a _one._ No pack in this pile.

That’s why Scott chose Derek for this, after all: kept him here, so none of these corpses would be wolves.

He can smell Derek’s blood, enough of it to skitter spiders up his nape. The thrum of him fills Stiles’ veins, and he wheels around, searches.

He’s on his back, far side. Scott kneels, one hand fast around Derek’s forearm, the other cupping the side of his neck, his head bent low over Derek’s. He’s speaking, a soothing Alpha hum at the base of Stiles’ skull where the bond has always centered, threading Derek through him. Stiles forces a breath, closes his eyes. Focuses. 

A bone-aching weariness overwhelms everything about Derek, but no injury, no pain. Stiles looks up. Derek’s chest heaves repeatedly; the fury of battle is recent, dripping like mist, and the sense of sound only just silenced lingers. Frenetic motion, suddenly stilled. Boyd has a hunter trussed at his feet, beaten and bloody, two more held against a tree by Isaac’s clawed hands at their throats. All the rest are dead. Derek must have dropped right where he stood as soon as reinforcements arrived.

Stiles vaults a body, crosses the clearing in five strides, and Derek turns his head at the noise.

“Stiles.” All the tension deflates from Derek’s body; his eyes slide briefly shut before snapping open. Stiles skids to his knees at his side, finding Derek’s hand in both of his. 

He presses a kiss to the back, then a smile. “Lying down on the job? Lazy.”

“They tried to take…” Derek’s next breath rasps. “Lee and…”

Stiles looks to Scott, and Scott tips his head to the side: their three youngest pack members are huddled under a tree. Shock prod, repeatedly, the way Lee shakes. The other two are no better; Sasha is covered in welts that aren’t healing like they should, and Tai looks like he witnessed a massacre. 

The hunters were trying to take them alive, then; for more experimentation, no doubt. The anger they have all lived with for a week surges. Stiles tamps it down with no small effort: no matter what happened, they _are_ alive, all three of them, and healing.

Erica goes to Boyd, a brush of their fingers, noses—regrounding—then crouches down before their youngest, touching each face and murmuring low in her throat. God, it’s… finally over. And the witch is definitely dead. Stiles smiles at Derek, massaging his palm, fingers pushing deep into the muscle, tapping into the protective sigils he buried there to check their potency. “They never see you coming, do they?”

Derek clears his throat wetly. “Amateurs.”

“Took them to _school.”_ Stiles shakes his head. “Beta Badassery 101. Your tenure’s safe at least.” 

Derek doesn’t answer this time. He works his fingers—sticky—further through Stiles’ and squeezes. His whole body huffs, each inhalation slumping out of him. 

“Okay.” Stiles looks down. Derek’s shirt is rent with holes, so tacky with blood that it looks black. A half dozen healing spells line themselves up behind Stiles’ eyes. He splays his free hand above Derek’s chest, searching out the best point of contact. “See what we’ve got here.”

“Stiles.” Something in Scott’s tone draws his head up. Scott is covered in blood and dirt, mud plastered to his left side. His irises are rimmed in faint red. His hand is tight around Derek’s other forearm, the other still resting at Derek’s throat, leaching pain in great black rivulets. 

_Rivers_ of it. 

“Scott?” 

Scott grimaces, and Stiles’ head reels in sudden understanding. 

He remembers, a mere two hours ago, in this very field: 

_Shield it._ Derek’s eyes, tracking steadily over his face as the sun set behind the house. _I can’t distract you, and you can’t distract me. Not tonight. If I get hurt out there and you feel it—_

Stiles breaks the charm with a thought, and pure, white agony rushes in. He fists his hand in the leaves, knuckles burning, rides it, chokes on it—can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe—

Forces it back until he can see.

“Derek,” he strangles out, but Scott speaks first.

“It’s already into his lungs.”

On cue, Derek’s body jumps. He coughs, spewing familiar black liquid down his chin. Not throwing it up, hacking it up.

“No—” Stiles scrabbles for Derek’s collar, wrenches the shirt wide, dumping the array of spells he’d been preparing in favor of others, and uncovers an invasion rampaging its way through Derek’s veins. 

“Where’s the bullet?” He twists on his knees, scrabbles at the dirt as though he’ll find it beneath his shins. “The arrowhead, the blade, the—where’s the rest?”

The hunter in Boyd’s clutches smiles, lopsided and ugly. “Only one with that blend.” He spits, and Boyd cuffs him hard, drawing stripes of blood. Still, the man smirks at Stiles, breathing heavily. “Only need one.”

Stiles tears his eyes away and checks Derek again. Not a through-and-through, and unlikely there’d be any wolfsbane left to salvage from it if it were. Fine. He’ll get it out the hard way. “Scott, give me your arm.”

Scott does without hesitation, and Stiles splits the skin with a touch, whispering encouragements, but “Easy, _easy.”_ The blood flows out mildly, as commanded. He smears his fingers in it, traces it over the veining in Derek’s chest, coaxes until it sinks beneath Derek’s skin. Again, he smears; again he traces, until Scott’s fist is shaking from the way he flexes to keep the wound open. Scott can draw a lot of pain these days, what with Stiles’ magic woven through him, but he can’t do it forever. Alpha blood itself is potent and, with the right augmentation, more direct; the black tracery through Derek’s chest slows. 

But it does not stop. 

He tries Margaret’s faerie magic, what little he can control, what little won’t exact a price he can’t pay. He tries Brythonic magic, a spell he read barely two days ago, the words still an overheated muddle under his tongue.

Nothing works. _Nothing works._

“No!” He slams his fist on the ground, then lays both hands directly on Derek’s chest and drags at the poison with his bare fingers, his thoughts. _Stop. STOP._

It stings, hooks into him, darts of fire, and he almost gets his fingers around it. But the wolfsbane curls cloyingly into his nose and throat. It fights him. It will not obey.

“Stiles, _Stiles.”_ Scott grabs his hand, forces him to a stop. He looks down. “It’s…”

Derek seizes, great shakes that bow his body off the earth. Scott slams down atop him, Erica diving for his legs, and Stiles grabs his mate’s face, forcing his head still. “Derek! Derek, listen to me, listen to my voice.”

The seizure is brief, and for a scant moment—hope. But Derek’s body gives a new, strange shudder, and just over the left side of his chest, the black collects suddenly into a dense knot. Derek’s skin empties completely of color, eyes flying wide. Stiles meets them and knows. 

“Derek, fight it.” His voice trembles. He gathers Derek back into his lap, arms around his torso, his tattoos alight with a harsh, green gleam. _“Fight.”_

Derek just twists their fingers together again. Their rings clink, and his mouth curves, soft. He pushes his face into Stiles’ belly and inhales, like they’re sitting on their couch on a Monday night. “Just wanted to see you.”

“No.” It’s blasphemous. Derek does not give up. _Scott_ does not give up, but he has, they both have. And Stiles’ magic, his spark, has failed him. Stiles looks around, anyone, anything. Boyd has gone utterly silent. Isaac is staring, eyes frighteningly wide, and Erica is a shifty, wild presence at Stiles’ side. Scott looks at him with devastated eyes, like— 

“Scott, I need them all, now, _please—”_

Scott barks out the order, dropping his head, and Isaac tosses his charges into the dirt, falling onto Derek and shoving his hands up under the remains of his shirt. The two unbound hunters scramble three feet before Allison rushes out of the trees, her arrow nocked at the closest one’s head. He stops dead. A second later, Lydia arrives, with Jackson and Ethan at her back. Jackson takes one look and grabs the other hunter by the throat, lifting her completely off the ground. 

Boyd kneels at Stiles’ back, big hands gentle on either side of Derek’s face. Jeannie arrives panting, her cat eyes shining in the dark; Nick in barely any clothing, and then Margaret, skidding to a stop with her blades in hand: Stiles hears all of their heartbeats, but there’s no time to bring them over, to explain. The three youngest pack members sit frozen, eyes locked on the scene. 

“Derek?”

Derek’s mouth opens, but instead of words, only too-fast breath. In out in out in out. It’s deep lunged, worse than any of Scott’s asthma attacks, and then suddenly he breathes in and—stops. 

His eyes drift, the lids dipping; his grip on Stiles’ hand goes slack. The last breath slips free of Derek’s lungs in a strange hiss, and inside Stiles, something taut and thick and fortified snaps clean in two.

**

Noise. He can’t see. He doesn’t have a body anymore, just a blaze of pain everywhere, all at once. Something is making a terrible sound, the worst thing he’s ever heard.

“—iles? No, god, _Stiles!”_

It’s him.

He jolts free with a gasp to find Scott inches away, hands locked on his shoulders. Someone cradles his body, and he realizes it’s Boyd, braced behind him and holding fast to his jaw. He swallows, tastes a wave of copper. He’s bitten his tongue. “S…cott.”

Scott’s expression goes lax with relief. He wipes at Stiles’ mouth with his thumb, then the heel of his hand. “Oh, thank god. Stiles, talk to me, you had a seizure. Stiles?”

Everything is a terrible, red haze. Everything is razored. He feels ripped, like an entire side of his body has been torn away. He looks down toward his hands and finds…

And finds.

The world rocks beneath his knees.

No.

No. No. No.

The clearing narrows, the smells and sounds going away, and all the light rushes inward into a stark cone. The tree behind the hunter fades into the darkness, the ground beneath him gone. The only thing Stiles can see is his cruel, smiling face.

“You,” he croaks, and Scott freezes, Boyd freezes, they all freeze.

_You did this._

The hunter’s eyes shoot wide, as though he’s heard the unspoken accusation. He presses back against the tree, but there’s nowhere to go. Stiles’ head fills with a terrible hum, but even that cannot counter the emptiness, the great, gaping hole where Derek used to be.

He opens his mouth. The sound he’s making is not human. Not wolf. He turns it full on the hunter before him, _you’re dead, you’re dead, YOU’RE DEAD._

The man’s eyes bloom red, bulge out of his face. His cheeks swell and his neck cords and his mouth spills wide, tongue lolling, nose gushing in a great burst. His bindings shred into nothing. Like a punctured balloon, he flops face first into the dirt, blood flooding from his ears.

Stiles draws a breath and turns to the other two hunters.

Someone yells his name. He throws them back, out from between, white light blazing around the faces he wants, but everything else in darkness. He sees young eyes so huge, so full of panic, smells the acrid burst of urine, hears the high pitch of utter terror.

“Let him kill them.” Erica, somewhere. “Just—just let him!” Her pain bubbles up afresh, poisoning the air. Someone howls, sharp and miserable.

Derek. His heart screams. Derek Derek _DerekDerekDerek—_

“Stiles, no!” Isaac, grasping at his shoulder. Stiles’ slaps him back with a thought, stretches with every bleeding wound within him toward the crying, blubbering mess in front of him.

Hands on his arms. “Stiles.” Scott. “Stiles, look at me, _look at me.”_

Scott. Alpha. For a second, Stiles obeys.

Scott’s face is streaked and wet, dirty with dark earth and blood. He looks a thousand years old. “Stiles? Stop.”

A heartbeat. Two.

“No,” Stiles snarls, wrenching away. There is still heat in the lifeless hand clutched in his, in the broad back resting on his knees. He stares down, clenches his fingers in fine, dark hair. _“No.”_ The smell of Derek’s blood fills his nose, crushes at his chest. Scott’s eyes widen. The air compacts—

New hands wrap round his chest. Isaac again. Stiles’ insides roar like the earth splitting, the rage fountaining red. He blasts Isaac off, hears the crack of body hitting tree. 

_“Stiles!”_ Scott, still in front of him. The world is tearing apart. Betrayal burns through Stiles’ veins. Not Scott, too?

A horrible look crosses Scott’s face. He reels back and slams a fist into Stiles’ skull.

**

He wakes to murmurs. It’s cold and bright.

“...don’t know.”

“What does your dad say?”

“That they could very well have something worse riding on their heels.” Allison, somewhere close. Troubled. “With what’s happened, if they come at us again, now...”

“I know.”

That’s Scott. Stiles’ mind is murk. The room is too bright. His eyes hurt, way back in his skull, and the side of his face throbs. His throat aches. There’s a clatter of metal against metal, murmured voices, the clink of bottles. Someone, somewhere, is weeping.

“How’s Isaac?” Scott asks, sounding broken.

“Healing. Scott, don’t. He’ll be fine, you know he will.”

“I should have—I should—”

“You did everything you could have. I was _there._ There wasn’t time.”

Her voice breaks on the last word. Stiles tries to swallow. He feels _sick,_ in ways he can’t describe. Witch. There was…a witch. Powerful one. Working with hunters, a lot of them. Strategic attacks, tearing through packs, abducting the youngest wolves and slaughtering the rest.

He planned. They all did, threaded it together in one sleepless, miserable night. There wasn’t time for anything else. 

His throat tastes coppery and raw. God, what happened? “Derek?”

He isn’t expecting to make a sound, but suddenly the whole room is dead quiet, except for that weeping. Stiles forces his eyes open and the room blurs. The light stabs in, makes him shut them again.

“Stiles?” A cool hand closes around his. He squints into Allison’s face, at her brow creased in relief, but her eyes are sad. Her face is covered in slices and scratches, the blood dry and the cuts loosely closed. The smell of the witch’s magic clings to the wounds. She squeezes his hand. “Hey.”

Scott looms in. “Hey, buddy.”

Deaton’s. He’s… at Deaton’s. He can smell Derek but he can’t see him. Can smell them all, really, too many bodies crowded into this room, and new scents, scents that weren’t there before; pack, all pack, the _whole_ pack, but his head is too jumbled to figure it out, and there’s a heavy, numb blankness coming from somewhere, like a fan motor on the brink of breaking, the buzz needling further and further into his nerves with every second. “Derek.”

Scott and Allison look at each other. Allison’s eyes are wet. Scott’s mouth opens, but it is Allison who finally speaks. “Stiles…”

“Where’s Derek.” Something’s wrong. Like seeing through one fuzzy eye and not being able to blink it clear. The witch _did_ something to him, he needs his bondmate.

He turns, twists, and sees a sea of broken faces. Everything’s washed out, the color blanched. Something’s wrong with his eyes. They all stare at him, helpless, except for the ones who aren’t looking at him, who can’t look at him, but the face he’s seeking is missing. He struggles up, elbows skidding on the cold metal gurney beneath him.

Scott grabs his wrists. “Stiles, wait, don’t—”

Across the room, between Deaton and Lydia, he sees Cora.

Cora, face streaked wet, curled almost in half as she hitches and heaves at the side of another gurney, both arms wrapped around her torso as though she’s holding in her innards, her hair half out of its ponytail and brushing over—over—

He remembers _everything._

The scream feels like it’s shredding his throat. He arches, yanks his hands against the grip on his wrists.

“Hold him! Hold—”

They can’t hold him, any of them. The lights flicker and the table he’s lying on starts to jump.

 _“Stiles!”_ cries a voice right in his ear, his dad, his _dad,_ and then Deaton’s palm flattens down over his chest like an anvil.

Everything goes black.

**

The next time he wakes, it’s dark and silent, and he knows in his bones.

There’s still a constellation map on the ceiling, glowing faintly: dots and streaks painstakingly placed by child fingers. He hasn’t slept in this room in years.

It’s tempting, for a minute, to just shut his eyes. Fall back. Not resurface.

But he’s not alone.

It steals over him, the not-alone-ness. He _is_ alone, for the first time in… He barely remembers a time without Derek. Being in this room again, he should.

But he has no place here anymore. Aside from the star map on the ceiling, everything is different. The walls are faint blue now, the bed large and generic. His desk is still here, but this room… This room belongs to someone else.

He turns his head.

Scott sits in his old desk chair, facing Stiles with both feet planted firmly on the floor. His hair is damp, his clothing is clean. He twitches when Stiles meets his eyes, and there’s something there, in his face, in... 

“Where.” Stiles stops; the rest disintegrates and exhaustion swoops in.

“They’re all downstairs,” Scott answers after a second. “They didn’t want to overwhelm you.”

 _Again,_ Scott doesn’t say. Someday, Stiles will care. Maybe. At this moment, it’s like half of him is asleep. Whatever was inside him has been stripped out, the meat of some fruit. 

Human fruit. Stiles snorts, weak. What is the meat of a human if not his heart? 

Scott rolls one of Deaton’s homemade suppressors in his palm. Stiles briefly shuts his eyes.

“You don’t need that.” His power is just _gone._ He can’t feel even a whisper of it.

Scott looks at the pouch in his hand, releases a sigh and sets it aside. He sounds, smells, so tired.

“You brought me to my dad’s.” Home. Once it was his home. Once, a very, very long time ago, he was safe here.

“Yeah.” Scott shifts a little, and the chair creaks. “We thought it would be better.”

But Stiles can follow the train without prompting, is in fact already at the terminus while Scott is only just picking up speed down the track: they moved him away, out of the harsh light of Deaton’s clinic, away from the harsher truth, as if he could ever escape it. As if every second of consciousness isn’t a terrible booming drum. They moved him so if he woke up, he wouldn’t see Derek again. Wouldn’t try to pull reality apart at the seams.

Is that what he did at Deaton’s? In the forest? He remembers darkness, the smell of dead leaves and loam, the way the hunter’s eyes had just ruptured inside his skull. 

He’d done _that._ He’d have done more. “Why?”

His best friend goes very still. “Why what?”

“You stopped me from killing them.” His words taste bitter.

Scott’s disgust flares like an aura. “Not for them. Shit, Stiles, I did that for _you._ You’re not... That’s not who you are, you never would have been able to live with yourself.”

“I can’t live with myself now,” he says, and Scott lets out a low whine and shuffles closer, wheeling the chair to the bedside. Pragmatism stops him, or maybe something else in the air. But Stiles feels the instinct biting into the room.

“Stiles,” Scott begs, at a loss.

“Scott?” He doesn’t know what his question is. Not a question at all. Helplessness in a sound.

Scott takes his hand. Doesn’t say anything. Just takes his hand.

**

His brain will not be still.

He’d forgotten. When it first formed, the bond had done things in one night that no amount of medicine ever accomplished, quieting his mind, coaxing all the excess energy down new paths, cinching the tangle inside him more tightly together. Grounding him to the firmament. But it’s gone, and what’s left is different than before: where his ideas used to scramble and claw over each other to be the first free, now there is no thought, no real design, just the incessant motion chewing at his mind, ratcheting his breath, spiking in his muscles until he’s a twitching, gulping mess.

In the middle of the night, his dad comes into the room and crawls onto the bed behind him, easing Stiles into the vee of his legs and settling back against the headboard with a groan. He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Stiles wraps his arms around one of his dad’s legs, presses his cheek to warm flannel, and tries to be still.

He wishes his thoughts would take shape. He wishes he were tired. He wishes he were anything. He’s been in shock enough times to know what this is, to smell the horror that’s dragging itself over the horizon toward him. But even fear is a ghost. All he really feels is empty, yet somehow still chock-full of motion. 

“Oh, kid,” his dad exhales. His hand comes down on the side of Stiles’ neck and his fingers press gently. “I _never_ wanted you to know this pain.”

“I can’t.” Stiles’ voice cracks, but the quiet in the room only sinks deeper. He licks his lips. “Can’t seem to… feel.”

“I want to tell you it gets better. But I can’t. Kiddo…” His dad sighs again. There’s a sharp, helpless edge to the sound. “Just. I love you. I love you more than anything in this world. If I could fix—” He stops. His palm is a warm pulse in an ocean of ice. “I love you, Stiles. I need you to get that. We all love you.”

He hears the underlayer plainly: _Don’t. Don’t… just don’t._

It’s a good thing he’s numb; the rest of what he shouldn’t do remains safely in the mist.

**

Deaton knocks on his dad’s front door, late at night when the neighborhood has gone quiet.

The bond gave Stiles other unexpected gifts. A little speed, a little grace, healing faster than he ever did before. Hearing like the wolves hear. It’s fading; he can feel it trickling away with each hour that passes. He’s fighting, holding onto it with all his might. But it’s because of the bond, because he was... he was mated to...

He shuts his eyes. Listens.

“I assume he’s here and not...?” Deaton trails off.

“He’s upstairs asleep,” his dad answers.

Stiles curls his lip at the ceiling. Joke’s on them: he hasn’t actually slept since Derek died in his arms.

“How is he?”

“Not well.” His dad sounds strangled.

Deaton sighs. Stiles pictures him standing there, his hands loose in his pockets. “I wish I had good news for you, John.”

No such thing, not anymore. Stiles loses track of the conversation, his sight filling with green-brown-gold, irises ringed in the thinnest gunmetal gray, finds it again when the ceiling hazes back into focus. 

“…want nothing but to help. But you should know that he’s keeping me away. Keeping us all away.”

A pause. “From Derek.” His father’s throat still sounds raw around Derek’s name. “How?”

“His magic, I think. Protecting the body.”

 _Not a body, he’s not a fucking—_ Stiles breathes in through his nose, deep. Out through his mouth.

“And the, the body, it’s not—”

“No,” Deaton answers. “He’s not allowing that either. I would say he’s locking Derek into the last single instant. No forward movement. No… decay.”

Stiles’ father’s horror is palpable. “Can he do that?”

“He’s doing it.” Stiles can practically see Deaton’s shrug. “It may be just him. Or it could be leftovers of the bond helping him along. Trying to pull things back together.”

It’s curious, in a far-off way. He’s not consciously trying to do anything to Derek. He’s just been trying to breathe. He’s been failing.

“But there’s nothing left to anchor it,” Deaton goes on. “I’ve never witnessed a mating bond between a born wolf and someone with Stiles’ abilities before. But theirs was extremely strong, enhanced by Stiles’ gifts. They were close before it happened, and it just got stronger. It made _them_ stronger. Individually, too, but the way it fused them together...”

“And now it’s broken.” 

“John.” The shuff of material as Deaton squeezes Stiles’ dad’s arm. “This is going to be bad.”

**

“Shit, what were you dreaming?”

Stiles blinks, up, into golden morning light. “Derek?”

“Stiles?” Derek parrots, raising one eyebrow. He glances down Stiles’ body, brow pulling into a frown, while Stiles’ mouth works and works. “You okay?”

“Derek.” He touches the wrist braced by his head, warm skin, _warm,_ the thrum of blood, the ripple of gooseflesh across Derek’s inner arm as Stiles’ thumb trips the sensitive coin-sized spot on the back, and everything just breaks. He’s gasping, throat sucking tight all at once, and Derek’s expression drops into alarm, his hands settling on Stiles’ shoulders, and— “Oh God,” Stiles chokes, “oh God, Derek.”

“What?” Those hands seize his face, skitter over his chest, cup his jaw, and every touch is a rattle straight to his center. He can’t breathe, there’s _too much_ air, he can’t speak, he just heaves and heaves until Derek cradles his face and presses their foreheads together. “Breathe,” he murmurs, just loud enough, “breathe with me, come on. Breathe, Stiles.”

 _Breathe._ He can actually breathe.

He tries. He matches Derek, in and out, and slowly his chest loosens. “Derek,” he whispers, over and over again, until the name sounds completely foreign. Derek’s nose presses alongside his, strokes upward across his cheek. Stiles chokes again, seizes handfuls of Derek’s hair.

Derek murmurs next to his ear, words too low to understand, but his voice sinks right into Stiles’ blood where it belongs. “You’re here.” He’s smiling. He can’t stop. He curls his fingers again and again over Derek’s scalp. “You came back to me.”

A soft snort. “Where did I go?”

Stiles leans back, to explain, to just look at Derek’s face, and realizes—

He can’t hear. 

Derek’s voice, yes. But he can’t hear anything else. Birds, wind, leaves clattering to the sidewalk, the raptor bait dog across the street. The window—his window, at his dad’s house—is open, streaming sunlight, but.

He can’t hear Derek’s heartbeat.

“Derek?” He presses his hand to Derek’s broad chest, looks up into his eyes. “Derek?”

Derek smiles, slow, and Stiles looks again.

Darkness, night, his old bedroom. His eyes feel dry as eggshells, wide open and staring into nothing. 

The only heartbeat is his own. He can smell Derek’s death on himself.

Stiles opens his mouth and screams and screams until his dad runs in.

**

He’s not even thirty. They only had each other, really had each other, for six years.

Stiles scrubs his face with the heel of his hand, and the hem of his sleeve scrapes his mouth. Erica stands at his back, eerily still, though this close, he can hear her heart. It’s nothing like De… like the others would hear, but it’s there all the same. 

The pack house is silent, everyone else gone, but even with the mess the hunters left, the sense of them all teases at his flesh: life, love, grief swirling in a lazy river through the hallways, curling around the banisters, in and out of the windows that have been thrown open to let the breeze through.

He’s upstairs, standing outside an unlocked door on trembling legs. Once he had the flu, so bad he hallucinated, couldn’t get his feet under him for days. The sensation is so similar. He wanted to be surrounded by pack, by _them,_ desperate to be filled with something, but now he’s staring at the door to the private apartment he shared with Derek and his heart is just slamming and slamming against his ribs.

He needs something. Something of Derek’s. He just needs to—

He turns the knob and steps through.

It’s dark. Not just in terms of light; the place is utterly still, the spark dead in the dust. The rooms look like plastered paintings, a farce shellacked over what Stiles recognizes, chairs and couches and lamps and windows. The flat screen sits dormant on the wall, the tumbler Stiles last left on the coffee table still there, remnants of orange juice crusted on the bottom. The room is utterly _saturated_ with Derek, as though he’s about to walk around the corner from the modest kitchen they rarely use, missing the bookshelf’s edge with his bare toes by inches, rubbing a hand backwards through his hair and raising his eyebrows in question.

“Derek?”

The absence yawns like a fanged mouth.

Stiles barely makes it back out the door before he’s on his hands and knees, vomiting bile onto the landing. Erica catches him on his way down and curls next to him, sniffling into the side of his face. She pulls him close, but he scarcely feels her.

**

When the bond takes, it wrenches Stiles’ orgasm from him.

There’s sweat and skin and broken words, and that is not new. Hasn’t been new for years. What _is_ new is the light spearing inside him, slinking up through each vein, cascading down every artery, rattling against the underside of his skin in fierce white starbursts. He buckles under it, folds down into Derek’s grip, and Derek’s hands squeeze fitfully, fingers digging into his ribs. Derek’s whole body is rigid, and Stiles realizes he’s coming, too. It surges, the sensation too much to be him alone.

Stiles shuts his eyes, clenches it out between his teeth. “God, it worked.”

He drags in a breath, and Derek is all around him, through him like the light. Everything is bright and sharp, crisped at the edges. His heart jolts—he knows what this is, he read about this—and he pulls back, trying to get a look.

The lamplight is full to bursting, the pockets of shadow in the corners a myriad of colors. He doesn’t remember their sheets being so blue, the ceiling being so textured, the smell of them so thick. He gapes. Derek’s face is… it’s…

“Is this what you always see?” He can barely speak; the sound shudders in his ears. The vibration of his voice in his own chest scatters his attention. 

Derek drops his face to Stiles’ neck, twists his head and groans, long and reedy, and so much more layered than Stiles ever knew. “Is _this_ how your mind always...”

Stiles cradles his jaw, pulls him upright. Touching Derek is like being touched, all over, everywhere. “Yes,” he breathes against Derek’s mouth, aroused beyond anything, kissing him. Savoring. “Yes, every minute,” even as he feels his mind quieting for the first time in years. He could cry with it, with how easy it finally is to _think._ “Every second.” _But today, it’s all you. From now on, it’ll only ever be you._

 _“Stiles—”_ Derek hauls him down at the hips, slides back inside him with an unsteady thrust, until Stiles quakes, alight inside and hunched over his mate—his _mate_ —full to the brim, his thoughts careening, but pointed as they never have been, fixed, zinging like arrows straight toward the center of them. 

“It’s beautiful,” Derek gasps, “you’re _beautif—”_

No one has ever called Stiles’ mind beautiful. He can be forgiven for crying a little after all.

He pushes Derek back down onto the bed, trembling. There’s one thing left, one last knot to tie. He reaches his left hand across and threads his fingers through Derek’s, lopsided so their rings click together, and whispers the words.

The flash, unlike the bond, is immediate, uncomfortably hot. It shoots up his arm and down Derek’s. Derek bows upward with a shout, and Stiles writhes, unable to stop their rhythm, building and building until the crest steals his breath all over again, sends his head rocking back, until Derek comes beneath him, into him. Derek’s hand seizes round his, tying them together, and Stiles finally tips forward, spilling across Derek’s heaving chest in a mess of limbs and sweat, their left hands still clutched between their stomachs.

“Oh god,” Stiles slurs against the hot arc of Derek’s throat. “Oh god.”

In the shadow between their bodies, their rings shine, twin eyes.

“Love you,” Derek mumbles, exhaling against the side of Stiles’ face. His free hand runs a track up and down Stiles’ spine. “Always.”

He smiles. Presses his ear to Derek’s chest.

Can’t hear Derek’s heart.

Stiles heaves his eyes open, to darkness. To emptiness. His face is all wet. With a low moan, he finds his ring, holds his hand up in front of his eyes. The metal is a dull matte, nothing but dirty ore.

**

He goes to Deaton’s when his father picks him up and drags him there, but the second they’re in the door, he can see his dad regrets it. Derek is _here._ The pull toward the icy darkness of the morgue is unbearable. It plunges in through the bands of Stiles’ ribcage and drags at him until Deaton grabs him, forces him down into a chair, because he’s tilting toward the bolted door to the cold chamber.

“Derek.” He doesn’t realize he’s saying it aloud until both his dad and Deaton wince. Even then, it’s barely a breath.

He should not have tied himself so physically. Because what else can this be? Derek isn’t here anymore, not really, but still he’s fisted around Stiles. Stiles knew better. He tries to tell himself, but even regretting the bond hurts, it’s so deep and so precious, so he stops thinking about it and collapses back into the fog.

The rest comes in pieces:

“Is he...?” from his father, and Deaton, shaking his head, gazing at Stiles like he hasn’t slept for a hundred nights.

His dad, clutching his hand as though he’s holding Stiles here.

“You have to watch him, John.” Whispered; Stiles has to strain to hear it now, the bond has nearly disintegrated. “Everything is ruptured. It’s convincing him he doesn’t want to be here, and the nature of his magic is such that—”

 _“I know_ the nature of his magic!” His father, covering his mouth with one hand, hissing a curse word into his palm.

Stiles wants to laugh. He wants to. The nature of his magic is the nature of will. Of what he wants. And right now, the desire for silence is swallowing everything else.

** 

He keeps dreaming of Derek. If they can be called dreams. He’s not exactly asleep. 

It’s like being stabbed, repeatedly and with a rusty blade. Each jab scrapes around inside him, catching on his ribs, puncturing muscle. Slicing tissue until everything feels slick and hot. Inflamed. He startles upright with the sound of his name echoing, as though Derek just said it aloud. Only it’s just the idea of it, the shape lingering in his ears.

If he could actually hear it, that would be something.

Deaton thinks he’s refusing the break. Doggedly yanking the bond’s two shattered halves together. Except it’s a futile battle; the damage is already done.

One night, his bedroom window slides open. Stiles struggles up onto his elbows. “Derek?”

It’s not Derek.

She stumbles to her knees on the carpet and crawls over to the bed, then just collapses against it. She breathes like her chest has been crushed.

Stiles slumps back onto the bed, eyes squeezed shut, forcing back the sound that’s trying to come out.

She comes again the next night, and the third. Tracing Derek’s footsteps from years ago. Each time, she sits at the foot of the bed, reaching until she can twist her fingers with Stiles’, and then… nothing. He tries to speak but there’s nothing to say, and eventually he realizes she’s crying, and he hates her for that. He wishes he could cry the way she can, that he can release. But what’s she’s doing is no sort of release, not really: the mere sound of it hurts him, like she’s grating herself up from the inside, trying to cough it free. And then he hates himself for hating her, and he twists their fingers tighter. Thinks _sister. Family._

It’s supposed to help, but it does nothing, nothing, _nothing._

The fourth night, Cora does not return.

He doesn’t brave the pack house again. The others come around, press to his sides or sit with him or hold his hand. They smell broken. He’s peripherally aware: bad weight on the air. Each visit is a haze as it happens, but afterward, the memories come in razor slices: Erica snaps and snarls at everything, Boyd doesn’t say a word, Allison’s jaw looks wired shut. Isaac stares like he’s peering out of a desiccated shell, and the young ones… their essences feel crushed. It’s hard to react, to care at all. All Stiles’ senses are smothered, and the wolfish ones keep sliding away one by one. His magic has crept back, but what’s left of it jitters and warps like the insides of his skull, fighting against him. Feels unfamiliar. Feral. He has the image of his body leaking, some kind of sieve. 

Melissa comes over and sits with him between shifts. Strokes his head and doesn’t hide her tears. Tries to get him to eat.

He’s just not hungry.

He loves her, he knows dimly. It hurts inside, a balloon trying desperately to inflate. Like Scott. Like his father.

**

When he isn't thinking of Derek—scant seconds when his thoughts are so thin they nearly fade away—he studies the hole around his heart. He imagines some _thing_ crawling inside it. Setting up shop again. Smothering him before he can make a sound.

He can’t hold all the fragments in place. Each second stretches into an individual hell, ticking by, and no one but him seems to hear it.

Stiles summons himself. “Mom.”

It cracks, a decade and a half of fissures tearing through. Tears blur the ceiling above him. He swallows, thick.

“Mom, help.” The sob sputters out of him. _“Help_ me.”

He doesn’t know how she would, what he’s even asking her to do, and no one answers anyway.

**

It’s hard to breathe. The air is thin, too hot. Stiles forces shallow, noisy breaths, closes his eyes and tracks the path of each sweat droplet as it slides down under his collar, over his sides to the small of his back, in between each toe. Like counting sheep, or so he will convince himself. He’d had no idea his feet sweated.

When he opens his eyes again, Derek crouches at his side, watching him silently. If Stiles had energy to spare, he would have startled; as it is, he accepts the failure, the possibility of lost time wherein he completely missed Derek coming into the house. God, he’s no use to anyone like this. One expenditure of the big magic and he’s down for the count. Some Emissary he is.

“It’ll go away,” he manages around a swallow. The couch, beat up and usually so soft, feels ridiculously coarse under his back, like untreated wool. His elbow keeps twitching, muscle spasms, and every swipe feels like fork tines across a plate. “Eventually. It’ll… wear itself out.”

Derek nods once, but doesn’t answer. Stiles nods, too: positive manifestation. _Be the change you want to see in the world._ He huffs. Tells himself that it, this, should have worn itself out hours ago, should have tapered away until all that was left was a whiff of smoke from Stiles’ small fire. Thank god his dad is working all weekend, though, because Stiles knows better: it won’t wear itself away soon. He knows he’s in for a long, hard haul.

“I know what you did for us.”

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut at a particularly strident wave of… pressure. That’s the best word, like organs rolling over lazily inside his torso, not pain exactly. Just change. Change is necessary. Change moves forward. Change is—

“Stiles.”

“Yeah.” He’s clammy and shiny, probably faintly green, not how he wants Derek to see him. Except Derek’s seen him worse; they’ve all seen each other worse. This time, though, it’s like Derek’s seeing inside him, and Stiles is too soft and sad and possessive of what’s in there to feel good about any of it.

“I know what you did for _me.”_

He reminds himself to breathe, but his chest has just tightened past endurance. The magic, trickling so slowly through the holes as it is, bottles up instantly, and Stiles pushes against the couch, clenching the cushions on either side of his hips, trying not to bow off of it.

“It’s okay,” he grits. Inhales through his nose and exhales through his mouth, and slowly, so damn slowly, the pressure lessens. Days, at this rate. He’ll have to call Deaton, ask him to take over warding duties. The leftovers from this spell need a very specific outlet. Without it, they will roil and lurch inside him until the magic is absorbed back where it used to be; into his blood and bones and cells, where it was minding its own business before he yanked it out into the open. “I needed tension. Potential energy. It’s fine.”

There is no energy quite as potent or as peculiar as unrequited energy, of any kind. Without it, the spell would never have worked and the Sidhe would have pounded right through them, Margaret and her sisters would be nothing but dust, and the pack would be in shreds, bound as slaves to malevolent faeries. If the cost was an acute but finite discomfort to a single person—in Stiles’ opinion, it didn’t even shift the scales.

He just wishes… Ah, but there’s no use in that. He had the power, they needed it, so he took it out for all of them to see. And…Derek saw.

Fingers close over his, and Stiles jumps. The magic ricochets madly at Derek’s touch, stirred like a hornets’ nest. Stiles envisions swelling fingers, bloating wrists, inflating arms and legs. Of course his body looks nothing like that, but it _feels…_

Well. He’s known what he feels for months, over a year now, hasn’t he? All this latent power just hovering at his fingertips if he ever needed it, because he can be friends with Derek and he can act the part, but he can never help what his damned heart is doing.

If he’d had any thought to his own sanity, he would have left it alone. But they do say power is addictive.

He grits his teeth harder as he feels the pulling sensation, and shakes his head. “Won’t work. Not pain exactly.”

Derek stops, but his hand remains, covering Stiles’.

“You never said.” It’s a murmur, deep in Derek’s throat like the rumble of his growl. Stiles shivers. He works his mouth, moves his tongue to clear what feels like spiderwebs gumming against his teeth.

“I said it’s fine.” _It’s not, it’ll never be fine again, now that you know. This changes everything._ He silences the thought. It _will_ be fine. He will make it fine. Just because someone doesn’t ask for a gift, has no desire for that gift, doesn’t make the sentiment less. He’s an adult, and a brand new Emissary. He did what he had to do to keep his pack alive. Who cares if he’s gone stupid for its second-in-command? No one, that’s who. It was the best he could come up with, and they were out of time. It’s magic. There was always going to be a sacrifice, but usually people think in terms of blood or bone. Not feelings or truths or secrets. Not raw confessions.

Positive manifestation. He has loved people who didn’t love him before. He has loved people who knew and didn’t care. He will handle this, like he has handled everything else. “I knew what I was doing.”

In theory, he could handle Derek knowing. In practice? Shit, he was such a fool.

Derek studies their hands, and Stiles looks too, if only to distract himself: the way his own trembles against the couch cushion; the way Derek’s fingers curl over the back of it; the way that, even with Derek’s incredible heat, it’s somehow cooler under his touch than anywhere else on Stiles’ body. 

He _wants_ to touch Derek. God, he always… wants to be close. The magic knows. Hell, maybe this way, in contact with the focus of all this power, it will settle faster somehow.

Derek turns his hand over and presses his mouth to Stiles’ palm.

The magic heaves. Stiles’ entire body spasms, fingers digging into Derek’s face. He gasps, sound breaking from him as the magic leaves him in a rush, pouring out through the fresh, raw breach Derek has just torn open. Derek’s hands clamp around Stiles’ fingers, turning his hand deftly, pushing the back of it against his stubbled face, and Stiles can only watch, mouth open and panting, blown apart with understanding.

“Derek.” It shakes out of him. No rupture unless the energy is welcomed, unless there are proper holes for it to fill, unless Derek… 

Derek leans over him on the couch and kisses his mouth, and whatever was left flies from Stiles in a heady whine. He surges up, his body not his own, instinctively seeking the counterpoint to all the aching, all the wistful hollowness, and Derek catches him, a hand splayed wide on his back, eyes glowing blue, mouthing out words Stiles can’t hear against his lips and teeth and tongue.

“Derek,” he breathes, half stifled, his head buzzing with a new kind of heat. It’s clean and soft and tantalizing, and he can’t believe it, except the evidence is _here._ He shakes his head, pulling back far enough to see Derek’s face, a face he has long since memorized. “I didn’t think you... I didn’t know.”

 _“Don’t_ be a martyr next time,” Derek warns against his mouth, and Stiles smiles, really smiles, for the first time in what feels like years.

He comes back to rain lashing the windows. Lightning fills his childhood bedroom for a brief, angry instant. Stiles gets up, stumbles downstairs, and steps out of his father’s house into the storm.

 _Marry me,_ Derek had rasped against his mouth, another night, another storm. _Marry me, Stiles_ —And Stiles had grabbed his face in both hands, kissed him until he tasted blood, wanted to climb inside him. _Yeah, shit,_ nodding again and again, until Derek’s grip on him eclipsed everything, including the rain pouring down their bodies. _Yes._

Tonight, the downpour slicks his hair to his scalp and sluices his clothing to his skin. Tonight, he runs and he runs and he _runs._

**

Scott comes over and sits in Stiles’ desk chair.

No _how are you_ s, no _talk to me_ s. “Shit, I’m so tired, man.” Scott rubs his face, poking into the corner of his eye with one finger to dig at a particular spot. 

This is what Stiles appreciates about Scott, has always appreciated about Scott. He doesn’t try to fix; he just feels. It’s more than Stiles is currently capable of.

Scott looks down, shoulders tense, then holds something out in the palm of his hand. It takes Stiles too long to recognize Derek’s ring.

“How did you get this?” No one has been able to touch Derek.

Scott’s face contorts. “Stiles… I’ve had it since that first night.”

It’s dull and smudged, like his own. Stiles works his own ring off his finger—even now, his body fights it, doesn’t want to give it up. But eventually it’s off. He fists the rings in both hands, trying to warm them with his body heat. But they remain ice cold, searing his palm. 

“Stiles.” There’s a weakness in Scott’s voice that sets Stiles’ nerves on edge. “I’m—”

“Don’t.”

“—sorry,” Scott pushes through. “I’m so, so sorry.”

It hisses out like steam: “I said don’t.”

“I know.” Scott’s miserable. The pain of the entire pack swamps him like a mantle. There are dark circles under his eyes, but they retain their light, pleading with Stiles from across the space. “God, I’m… I know.”

Stiles says nothing. There’s nothing to say. 

“He saved them,” Scott goes on gently. “Sasha says the hunters tore up the house. Drew him off and got in, and—He went after them. If not for him—”

“I know.” He knows what would have happened to Sasha, to Tai, to Lee. It’s buried under the sludge, but he can still feel it.

“I needed him.” Scott sounds like he’s begging. “He was my strongest—”

 _“Scott.”_ It rasps, a file over metal. _Was._ Stiles can’t… He…

“I know that you’re hurting.” Even as he says it, the self-loathing grinds under the words, like Scott hates the say them, to even approach this level of insult. “But we need to _see_ him. We need to—to grieve. And you’re not letting us.”

If Stiles knew what he was doing, he would stop. He would. He knows even as he thinks it that it’s a lie. And still Scott stares at him, eyes huge and exhausted. 

“He’s pack, Stiles. Erica and Isaac and Boyd… Even Jackson. They’re falling apart. He made them, he… I can’t do anything for them, not for this.”

 _Yes, he made them. But he was mine. God, he was_ mine.

Scott clenches his hands over his knees, squinches his eyes shut. “For god’s sake, you can’t do this to Cora.”

Three nights in a dark room, listening to her try to breathe, to the familiar patter of her heart, and where was Scott then? “Don’t talk to me about Cora.”

“Please, Stiles. The pack needs this, we can’t just… You have to let us grieve.”

“The pack needs this?” He gets to his feet, and Scott looks up at him from the chair. _“I’m_ pack, Scott. I am.”

“I know you are. God, I know. I can’t imagine what you’re going through, but this isn’t—” 

His magic thrashes, flogging at his innards, beating against his temples. “He was my _mate.”_

“And he was my _brother,”_ Scott snarls, and Stiles shoots out both hands and hurls him into the wall.

The magic shudders through the room, jagged-edged. Stiles blinks, sways where he stands. Scott lies in a heap, half upright in the corner by the window with one clawed hand tearing into the carpet, staring at Stiles like he’s never seen him before.

“Scott,” Stiles whispers. His mouth tastes coppery. “I…”

Scott’s mouth works, but nothing comes out.

He doesn’t know how he gets out of his room, but he does, down the stairs to the kitchen. He digs in the drawers until he finds the strawberry paring knife, then stands at the sink, mutters a shielding charm so Scott won’t smell, and cuts a barrier sigil into the skin above his heart.

No more magic.

**

He wakes in Deaton’s morgue, the sigil scratched through by his own bloodied nails, the door to the drawer blown off its hinges, and Derek... Derek’s _body..._

This time when Stiles throws up, it doesn’t stop.

**

Derek looks the same as he did, as though two weeks haven’t passed. Derek looks nothing like himself.

Stiles circles the table, hand hovering. Drawn in. The room is a mess, filled with the detritus of Stiles’ entrance, but Derek is pristinely laid out. His limbs, loose and even. His hands, settled over his stomach: reverent. Treasured. He’s still clothed in the stained jeans he wore that night, the shirt that Stiles had ripped at the collar. The magic kept him safe, even as it tore everything else apart to reach him.

He touches Derek’s bloodless cheek. The skin feels tight and cold, like stone.

“God, Derek.” His voice doesn’t sound like his own. Derek is beautiful, perfect and porcelain, the rents in his flesh paled to nothing and the blood washed away. The soot of his eyelashes stands out, coal and alabaster, and if that were all there was to Derek’s sublime pull—

Stiles shuts his eyes too late: the tears squeeze through, freezing his face in the chilly room. Crying hurts, an endless wrenching at his chest, each breath forcing his ribs further and further apart.

“I can’t.” There had been a time when he thought—when he knew—he could do anything. But this... “Oh, baby, I can’t be here without you.”

He should have no grief left in him, he’s cried so much. He feels like his very bones have been weeping.

“Please don’t do this.” It’s too late, though. Derek is two weeks dead, and every second since has dragged on past all endurance. Stiles feels like he’s been alone for a lifetime.

But he can remember this body like it was yesterday, hot and alive and cleaved to him, Derek’s smile against the corner of his mouth. Derek’s hands, large and warm over every inch of his skin. Derek’s lips tracing his brow, parting against his own. The bend of his bare back in the light, the tattoo spanning his shoulders, the way he shuddered at the height of pleasure, the way he curled around Stiles like he could block out the world. Derek’s muscles contracting beneath his touch, Derek’s fingers inside him, Derek’s breath skating his ear, wrecked gasps. He takes Derek’s hand, looks down and instead sees fingers twined with his, wide knuckles shifting, thumb stroking the juncture of wrist and palm.

He shuts his eyes. When he opens them again, Derek’s hand lies limp in his own.

The rings burn a cold pit into his palm. He fumbles Derek’s up and slides it back onto his finger where it should be. The metal stays dull, clouded, even when he puts his own on, when he twines their hands together, touches their palms. Kisses the back of Derek’s knuckle and tastes the metal’s iron flavor.

He wipes his face and crawls carefully onto the table, easing down at Derek’s side until he’s pressed along the length of him, until he can curl one knee between Derek’s, until he can wrap his arm around him like he used to. He buries his face in Derek’s shoulder and hauls in a breath. The chill, the emptiness, lies heavy, but underneath it, underneath the old blood, Derek’s scent remains.

_Please don’t leave me, don’t leave me here alone, I want to die, I want to die like you._

He doesn’t want to die, not really. Doesn’t want to leave his dad, Scott, the pack. But what is the pack, _his_ pack, without Derek?

“I just...” He takes a deep, exhausted breath and pushes his face into the cold flesh of Derek’s neck. Exhales. Imagines a flutter there against the end of his nose. “Just want to be with you.”

He’s not whole. There’s a wound straight through him. He feels it as new every moment.

“I just want to be with you,” he whispers—weeps—again and again until it fills the space like a heartbeat. “Just want to be with you.”

**

A hand threads through his hair. “You awake?”

No. If he admits it, this vanishes, like last time, like all the times. He’s warm here, full, tired and sleepy like he hasn’t been in days. He squeezes Derek’s body tighter. Presses closer, as close as he can get.

“Stiles.”

Something in him must have accepted that he would never again hear his name in this voice, because it cuts so _deep._ Stiles inhales sharply and lifts his head.

Bathed in the clinical light of Deaton’s morgue, Derek looks down at him.

“D...” The first try is nothing but air. He hates himself. Try as he might, this hope won’t die. It keeps coming back. Stiles wets his lips. “Derek?”

Sallow eyes, whitened skin, but _heat._ Through his palms where they rest on Derek’s sides, through his front where he presses to Derek’s chest. In the slow puff of breath through Derek’s nose over his face. Stiles’ lungs suddenly feel like they’re expanding through his ribs.

_“Derek?”_

Derek cradles his face, thumb touching down like a feather at the corner of Stiles’ mouth. His eyes flick once around the room, then fix on Stiles. He smiles. “Yeah?”

On the back of the word—in the curve of Derek’s lips—it rushes in: Stiles gasps, aware all at once of the warmth, not only where he’s touching Derek, but in the core of his spine, in the pit of his belly. The bond, knotted back around every inch of him, filling all the empty, wretched hollows with... with...

He drags Derek to him, and the metal table clangs, jolts, but he doesn’t care. Can’t care. “Derek— _Derek—”_

 _Heat._ The flutter of Derek’s pulse, visible at this throat, the hum of the bond; underneath it all, Derek’s heart thumping a steady beat into his ear.

He reaches, and immediately Derek reaches back.

“Oh _god.”_ It tears out of him. Derek’s arms close around him, hands splaying wide and warm over Stiles’ spine, and Stiles hears his voice, but _it doesn’t matter_ because he can hear the rest of Derek too, again, the thrum and the whisper, the settled hum of connection. Of shared life. Derek makes a wounded sound, and Stiles knows there are tears streaming down his face, that Derek can not only see them but feel what’s behind them. “Oh god, thank you, thank you.”

“Stiles—” Each time he says Stiles’ name jolts the heart. “What is it, what’s… Stiles.”

“You were dead.” It spills out, poison expelled from his body. “You died. You died in my arms, I couldn’t—There was nothing I could—”

 _Hell,_ his body screams, _it was hell,_ and Derek stiffens, looking into his eyes. 

Stiles feels it the instant he remembers.

Derek’s limbs seize, claws pricking into Stiles’ sides. His eyes go wide, his face whiter even than death. He stares at Stiles like his world is ending. But it’s not. Because he’s _there,_ in Stiles’ head, in his breath and veins. Where he should be.

“It’s okay.” It’s easy to be the one to soothe now; the bond has always balanced them against each other. Into each other. What one needs, the other is always there to give. He strokes Derek’s face and presses a hand to his chest, counting too-fast heartbeats, listening to his stuttered breath as it slows back down. “It’s okay, it’s… over.”

What’s over? He has no damned idea. He doesn’t know what happened, what he did. And if it’s what he thinks he did—He can’t handle that right now. That understanding, that weight, is far too big.

“Merciful goddess,” someone breathes behind him. Derek looks up—Stiles turns and finds Deaton at loose ends in the open doorway, staring at them where they lie on the gurney in the middle of the trashed room.

“Is it him?” Stiles demands, because like the hope, this fear will not die, even though his body is in bliss and his veins are singing. Deaton is his mentor, Deaton taught him everything he knows. “Is it…”

Deaton steps forward as if jarred, his face a landscape of astonishment. He tears his eyes from Derek and they race over Stiles instead. Stiles has the impression he’s seeing something no one else can. “Don’t _you_ know?”

 _Yes,_ his entire being cries. And maybe he just needed that last push, that final interference, to be certain. “Yes.” He loses track of Deaton, sees only Derek, touches their mouths together again and again. Whatever he did, if he somehow… He doesn’t know, but he’s certain about this: “Yes, it’s him.” No one fits into Stiles like this but Derek.

Deaton comes closer at last, runs shaking hands over Derek’s arm and face and side. Leg. Chest. His fingers pause over Derek’s heart, and Stiles sees him shudder. Wide eyes flick to Stiles. “How.”

“I don’t know.” But… he does. 

The nature of his magic is the nature of his will.

Deaton looks back at Derek, and though he’s breathing hard, his eyes have already narrowed, gone calculating. He lifts his hands away from Derek’s body as though remembering that he is a person and not a thing, and takes a careful step back. “Later,” he says. “This… will keep.”

It’s almost a question. He’s not sure. Stiles should be scared by that, by his teacher and guide not knowing, by the suggestion that once outside of this room Derek could just disappear. But he’s not afraid. _He_ knows. He can feel Derek’s life force beating through him, can feel where it’s tethered into both their bones. His essence is whole, and here.

**

Time is nothing. Stiles loses track.

He’s aware of Derek nosing the side of his face. Of Deaton murmuring into the phone. Mostly he’s aware of the sure thud of the heartbeat in tandem with his again. 

At some point, Scott trip-slides into the room on sneakered feet and doesn’t stop, banging into the gurney where Derek now sits upright with Stiles beside him. But he doesn’t touch. His hands hover, shaking in midair until Derek takes them, and then Scott shudders, drags him down off the gurney and smothers him, rubbing his face into Derek’s shoulders and jaw, his dominant hand seized around Derek’s nape. A blink and he yanks Stiles in, too. Stiles smells pack, Alpha. Brother, and home. It floods his insides through the bond, coming from both Derek and himself, his senses sharp as needles again. Scott howls, long and deafening in the enclosed space, and then Stiles feels the rest of them coming, a quickening as though the air is condensing, tethers drawing tighter and tighter. Eventually, cars pulling up, footsteps on the walk outside, whines of disbelief, laughter that ends wet and broken.

He ends up in his dad’s arms, not sure whose tears are on his face. Beside him, Cora drapes over her brother like they’ve been carved out of the same stone, and their particular silence is sharp with a decades-old shock. With relief. 

**

“You know what you did?”

Everyone else has left, even Deaton, though he’s still around here somewhere. It’s late, so very late. Stiles and Derek sit side by side on the gurney, wrapped together by a blanket that smells like lilac detergent, faintly of dogs. Derek’s fingers trail again and again through Stiles’ hair where his head rests on Derek’s shoulder, like he’s forgotten he’s doing it. 

“No.” Stiles sniffs. Rubs his nose against the flannel of Derek’s shirt. The old, bloody one is gone, hopefully for good. Derek’s voice is a guttural hum, filling each chink, soothing battered edges. How could Stiles miss a thing so damn much? “Maybe.”

One breath. Two. When he inhales, Derek’s chest cavity sounds vast and deep. “Did you know you even could?”

For two long weeks, he didn’t know anything. The wound is a ghost, twinging like an injured knee before a storm. The bond is different now, scarred but stronger than ever. He can _feel_ Derek now, like… like… expanding lungs and racing blood. Involuntary motion made purposeful. He’s never physically felt a heart beating before, the lubbub of it like flexing a hand, gripping tight and releasing. But Derek’s heart beats. “I brought you back. That’s all I care about.”

Derek looks him over, and Stiles would brace himself for fear—god knows he’s half afraid of himself—except there _is_ none. Just Derek’s eyes drifting over him. Absorbing. Stiles holds still until he can’t take it anymore, and then presses his face into the side of Derek’s neck.

Deaton and Scott and Lydia, even his dad, they can all look at him like they don’t quite know what they’re seeing, but if there were fear here, in these eyes, that would be the end of him.

He knows what Derek is thinking. He’s thinking it, too. What’s happened here will get around. Others will learn of it, and it will be the Nemeton all over again: they’ll come to Beacon Hills, to see or to touch. Some of them to take. 

Well—and he hears Derek’s soft huff of agreement—they can certainly try.

Still…

“What am I?” Something more than an Emissary, than a witch, than a spark. Was he whatever he is before this, or did he make himself this way by refusing to let Derek go?

“You’re mine,” Derek says as though it’s a normal question. “And I’m yours.”

“Yeah, but…” Stiles ponders it for a moment, and decides that tonight, he just loves. He’s in love. That’s all.

“Come on.” Derek slides off the gurney to his feet. He stretches, his back somehow uncoiling as his spine arches, and he shivers as he comes down. Stiles watches, enthralled. “Let’s go home.”

He reaches out, both hands. Stiles takes them.

They head through the quiet clinic and out to the exit. The animals are all asleep. At the doorway out to the parking lot, though, Stiles seizes Derek’s arm, holds him still. There’s no specific thought; just dread. _Stop. No further._ His magic fills these rooms. It presses, grown too large for his body but locked close by Deaton’s charmed walls. Outside this door, there is only darkness and air; it will rise away from him into the atmosphere, and _Derek…_

He feels Derek watching him. He can’t look back; he’s frozen, even his lungs. He stares out into the night, chest growing tighter and tighter. If something doesn’t happen, he’ll suffocate right here, trapped between one world and the next.

Derek’s fingers thread between his. He takes Stiles’ hand, presses it tight to his side where his ribs expand and contract with each breath, and steps over the threshold, pulling Stiles after him.

**

It’s misting, still. Night, still. The world is muffled and dripping. 

Derek squeezes his fingers, still.

Stiles exhales, stumbles through the doorway into the night, against Derek’s side. His throat burns, high up at the back. He can’t speak for how his chin is trembling.

_Alive._

Derek gathers him in and meets their mouths, tongue and teeth and staggered breath. Stiles sighs Derek’s name, let’s himself shake, cry, clutches as tightly as he can. Derek doesn’t say a word about it.

**

The pack house is quiet and dark tonight. Whole. 

“I didn’t mean to leave you,” Derek breathes against his mouth, in their bedroom heavy again with their scent. Their rings send water-light over his face, limning his lips, turning his eyelashes silver and bathing the room in blue. 

Stiles’ magic scatters across the walls as they curl and thrust together, fingers entwined so tightly his hands feel bruised, slick with sweat and dizzy with heat, the tattoos on his arms and chest glowing like coals, and Derek so deep in him he’ll never leave again. 

“S’okay,” he gasps. “I’ll never let you go.”

**

_Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides. – Lao Tzu_

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Triggery bits: Derek really dies. He does not stay dead. But there is significant self-destructive emotional pain on Stiles' part while Derek is Not Alive, including a verbalized wish for death. Severe depression and grief. Stiles also uses his magic to violently kill someone. It's kind of (not really) an accident?
> 
> Many thanks to coffeejunkii for the beta!! As usual, my dear, you were wonderful. ^_^


End file.
